Did Audi ‘give up’ on GT3 too soon?

Whatever happens in the remainder of their racing careers, Ariel Levi, Sebastian Ogaard and Rocco Mazzola will never forget the remarkable sequence of events that led to their Tresor Attempto Racing Audi taking an underdog GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup victory at Monza last weekend, the brand’s first since ending its factory support for the R8 LMS GT3 family of cars in 2023.

The unheralded Silver Cup trio, with an average age of 22.3 years and a previous best finish of fifth achieved by Ogaard at Barcelona last year, were nobody’s tip for outright victory having qualified 29th. HRT’s Ford Mustangs that started first and third looked the better bet, at least until a dramatic lap one pile-up eliminated both and five other cars on the spot.

The shunt paved the ground for a shock result and Mazzola found himself in the lead after the final stops, as the team aced its strategy. The Italian held off Marvin Dienst’s Bronze class Winward Mercedes-AMG at a late safety car restart and, when the German was crudely removed by a barrel-rolling Porsche that ended the event as a contest, delivered one of the year’s feel-good stories by ending Audi’s four-year Endurance Cup drought.

That would have been almost inconceivable had you polled the paddock at Hockenheim in 2022, when Christopher Mies, Patric Niederhauser and Lucas Legeret crossed the line first aboard their Sainteloc Audi, leading Markus Winkelhock, Dennis Marschall and Kim-Luis Schramm’s similar Attempto example in a 1-2. Only a late puncture for Christopher Haase’s Car Collection machine denied an R8 podium sweep on a day WRT’s Audi had started on pole and looked set to convert until retiring with gearbox problems.

For the newly-updated LMS GT3 Evo II model, which had already triumphed at that year’s Nurburgring 24 Hours with Kelvin van der Linde, Robin Frijns, Dries Vanthoor and Frederic Vervisch on the driving strength for Phoenix, success kept coming. WRT duo Vanthoor and Charles Weerts won their third consecutive title in SRO’s Sprint Cup that year, then in 2023 Attempto’s Ricardo Feller and Mattia Drudi made it four on the spin for Audi.

But, by the time of their coronation, it had already been decided that Audi would scale back its customer racing programme, end its factory involvement and cease production of the GT3 in 2024. It was a sign of the brand’s shifting priorities, having announced in August 2022 that it would enter Formula 1 - initially just as a power unit manufacturer - in 2026.

Audi making its F1 debut in 2026 was part of the reason for it ending its factory GT3 programme

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

Mercedes had shown it was possible to successfully combine customer racing with F1, but Audi deemed it necessary to strip away its other programmes (Dakar would fall by the wayside in 2024) to dedicate more resources to its shiny new project. The same logic scuppered plans to join sister Volkswagen brand Porsche in returning to Le Mans for the brave new LMDh era, due to be spearheaded by WRT. The axe fell in March 2022, just a few weeks out from the start of testing, and led directly to Vincent Vosse’s team striking up a partnership with BMW that recently yielded its first outright World Endurance Championship win with ex-Audi aces Rene Rast and Frijns in the lineup.

Although it did commit to continue servicing and providing spares for the R8 LMS Evo II until 2032, there was an inescapable feeling that Audi may have cut its losses too soon. Does that ring true?

Having decided to end production of the R8 road model in 2024 too, there is a certain cold logic that it makes little sense to continue promoting a moribund model. ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ doesn’t work if the car in question is nowhere to be found in the showrooms. And there can be no denying that the F1 platform puts more eyeballs on Audi than even a successful customer racing programme can. Spending money on itself is no guarantee of success - just ask Toyota - but funnelling more of it to the F1 effort means Audi cannot be accused of half measures.

If Audi had continued to back its customer teams with full works lineups for the big 24-hour enduros, it stands to reason that rival brands would not have benefitted from hoovering up its talent pool and the car would have remained competitive

If the bosses at Ingolstadt were serious about capitalising on F1’s booming popularity and writing a new chapter of motorsport success to rival its feat of winning Le Mans 13 times, the timing made sense too. This year’s shakeup was F1’s first engine reset in over a decade, affording a rare opportunity for new manufacturers to shape new rules and arrive on a levelled playing field with the incumbents. Audi executives would have seen Honda’s difficulties after arriving a year late to the hybrid era in 2015 and knew their chances of success would only diminish by attempting to play catch up further down the line.

And yet, it remains a hefty roll of the dice. Time will tell whether the two points scored by Gabriel Bortoleto in Melbourne are the start of something special for a programme which has not been helped by the turmoil surrounding team principal Jonathan Wheatley’s departure - although the arrival of Allan McNish as racing director to assume many of his responsibilities has helped to cushion the blow. It is far too soon to assess whether the benefits brought by involvement in motorsport’s most prestigious championship outweighs success in GT racing.

But triumphs in this field are nothing to sniff at and, with such a well-proven product, are perfectly within reach. As GT3 is a Balance of Performance platform, cars ought to be capable of achieving the same laptimes. At Monza on Sunday, 33 cars were within a second after qualifying based on an average of all three drivers’ times. Audis should be no less capable of success when the team running them executes the strategy and set-up, and drivers are able to make the most of it, than any other brand – regardless of it being one of the oldest bits of kit around. The Audi hasn’t simply become uncompetitive overnight, as Scherer Sport underlined at the Nordschleife in April by winning the N24 Qualifier with an all-Pro lineup of Haase, Alexander Sims and Ben Green.

Scherer Sport at the Nurburgring 24 Hours with its R8 LMS

Photo by: Gruppe C GmbH

A decorated GT driver who plies his trade with another manufacturer shares this view and fondly recalls his first experience of the R8, when he found it was “probably the most well balanced GT3 car I have ever driven”. He believes it still has plenty to offer against newer equipment in the right situation.

“It just did everything incredibly well,” he explains. “It was similar to any other car in that you can get it right or just miss the window a bit depending on how you need it to be, but when it was right, it was phenomenal.

“The car feels slightly dated but it’s more from a visual interface perspective. The systems themselves work well and it’s not really missing much. Because it can be such a good car, I think it tends to just be a bit underpowered, making it tough to race. I feel like the top speeds can be relatively good still, but the power to get out the corners is hampered quite often in BoP.

“So although BoP might be spot on over a lap, it just means that when you get caught out in traffic or stuck behind others and cannot exploit the cornering performance, then you’re on the back foot.”

Where the difficulty lies is that, without factory support, assembling a driver roster that contributes nothing to funding the car becomes economically unfeasible. It was always going to be difficult to retain the likes of Rast, Frijns, Vanthoor, and Nico Muller without the carrot of the LMDh programme but, if Audi had continued to back its customer teams with full works lineups for the big 24-hour enduros - a tactic that yielded glory at Spa with three different customers - it stands to reason that rival brands would not have benefitted from hoovering up its talent pool and the car would have remained competitive.

While the likes of Comtoyou (victorious at the Spa 24 Hours with Aston Martin in 2024) and Abt (whose Lamborghinis qualified 1-2 at the recent N24) have joined WRT in seeking pastures new, two factors predominantly explain why the likes of Sainteloc and Tresor Attempto continue to run the Audi; firstly, a considerable financial outlay is needed to change brands, which may not make sense while they can still find customers willing to drive it. Furthermore, the bank of knowledge they have built up with the Audi would require a good proposition to switch.

That loyalty paid dividends at Monza for Tresor Attempto. While the winning crew may have needed a few strokes of fortune, it was still a force on pace. That was demonstrated by its Gold Cup entry of Dylan Pereira, Andrea Frassineti and Lorenzo Ferrari qualifying second, although its race was irreparably hampered by Ferrari becoming embroiled in the lap one carnage. Their pace points not only to the BoP working well, but the enduring class of a package which could feasibly be winning far more often had Audi not allowed some of its biggest assets to slip away.

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